The Million Dollar Question: Roughly what share of US homes purchased at $5 million or more are bought through LLCs?
The Million Dollar Question this Friday:
Roughly what share of US homes purchased at $5 million or more are bought through LLCs rather than in the buyer’s personal name?
A) ~10% B) ~30%+ C) ~50% D) ~80%
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Most people guess low — somewhere around 10%, on the assumption that hiding a home purchase behind a shell company is a rare, cloak-and-dagger move reserved for the ultra-famous. The actual share is roughly 30% or more, and has only grown since. Zillow’s 2012 analysis, cited by CNBC, found nearly a third of US home sales above $5 million went through LLCs — making LLC ownership the single most-used wealth-privacy tool in the country, not a fringe tactic.
The mechanism is mundane rather than mysterious. A buyer forms a limited liability company — typically in Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada, or increasingly New Mexico — and the LLC, not the human being, appears on the public deed and county tax records. Done properly, the LLC uses a registered agent for service of process and a manager-managed structure that never names the actual owner in any public filing. Property records in Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Bel-Air are now dense with entities like “Blue Raven Holdings LLC,” each one created to hold a single house. The protection is real but partial: a well-resourced plaintiff, a tax authority with subpoena power, or a patient journalist with access to title-insurance records can often pierce the structure. For casual visibility — the nosy neighbor, the data broker, the stalker with a search engine — the LLC works close to perfectly.
What the answer reveals: privacy at the top of the housing market isn’t an exception, it’s close to standard practice. And the tool survived a real threat in 2025 — the Corporate Transparency Act’s beneficial-ownership reporting rule, which would have forced disclosure of the humans behind these LLCs to FinCEN, was effectively suspended for US persons that March, leaving the anonymity infrastructure intact for now.
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This question is treated in full in Privacy: Why the Wealthy Value Invisibility, which maps the full wealth-privacy stack — LLCs, trusts, data-broker removal, and the captive-PR layer at the top — and what each tier actually costs.
If you have a Million Dollar Question you’d like to see treated in a future Friday email, send it to [email protected].
— Logan Pierce
Editor, How Millionaires Live
